Trickster s Girl - By Hilari Bell Page 0,11
remained seated on the rock as she approached.
"Are you following me?" she demanded, though only an idiot would give her a confirmation on record.
"Of course I am." He shot her that glowing, untrustworthy smile. "How else can I talk to you? Are you ready to believe in magic yet?"
If he had followed her, how had he gotten ahead of her on the trail? He must have realized where the shuttle was going and hiked up before her. But Kelsa hadn't been on this trail for months. Had he been watching her, stalking her, for that long?
A shiver that had nothing to do with her damp shirt ran over her skin.
"I don't believe in magic," she said. "I've told you before that I want you to leave me alone. And I'm going to enforce it. I'm going to the police."
The smile still lingered, though his eyes had grown serious. "This little thing, it makes a record of our conversation?" He gestured to the thumb-size pod.
"Of course." Kelsa frowned. There was no place in the world so backward that people wouldn't know what a com pod was!
He may not have known much about tech, but the clasp on the lanyard was simple enough for anyone's understanding. He rose to his feet and reached out - she'd forgotten how quick he was - and pinched the catch open, dropping the com pod into his hand.
Kelsa had stepped back, but now she lunged forward, snatching at the pod as he twisted aside. "Give me that! It's mine!"
He threw it into the river.
Kelsa had never before felt the kind of fury she did then; it surged through her blood, whiting out rational thought.
"You bastard! My father gave me that!"
She pushed him.
She hadn't thought it through. She was sure, almost sure, that she hadn't intended to kill him. But they were standing at the top of the riverbank, and Kelsa put the full weight of her body and her anger into that shove.
He stumbled back and fell over the edge.
She heard him hit several rocks on the way down, heard the splash as he hit the water. She reached the edge just in time to see him sink.
It was only a few feet deep, but the channel here was narrow, the current hard and fast. One white sleeve splashed to the surface, but his face didn't emerge. Why didn't he stand up? Start to swim? Had he hit his head? Whatever the problem, he'd be too far downstream for her to reach him if she took the time to scramble down the bank.
Kelsa knew this river, this trail. She ran down it, keeping one eye on the shimmering white of his shirt and another on the rough surface. If she broke an ankle, he might die!
The few minutes it took her to reach the bend where the river spread and slowed, where the trail dipped down to the water, seemed an eternity. Kelsa rushed into the river, stumbling on the slippery rocks, feeling the chill soak through her jeans, into her shoes. Her eyes were fixed on the patch of white floating just below the surface, and she managed to position herself in front of it. Plunging her arms and face into the water, she fisted both hands in the fabric as the current whisked it past.
Even before she hauled it out she knew the shirt was empty.
A scream rose in her throat and she stared frantically, trying to catch a glimpse of a body beneath the rippling surface, a hand breaking free, anything -
The silver fish that leaped out of the river was the biggest she'd ever seen, easily four feet long. Larger than anything that could survive in a creek that vanished every winter. Kelsa's jaw dropped. She was already clambering toward the shore when it jumped again, out of the water and into the muddy shallows.
Kelsa struggled up beside it, close enough to see each gleaming scale and the seep of blood from a gash over one round fishy eye, before it began to change.
In the full sunlight, the stretching skin and warping bones should have been even more horrifying. But the fish was turning into something human, instead of a human dissolving, and perhaps that made it less shocking - it could never be less than grotesque. His skin still had a silvery cast when his features became clear enough to be recognized, and a gash over one eye oozed blood. Then he began to cough - hard, rasping coughs, like someone